Archive for the ‘WordPress Tools’ Category

CommentLuv is a great way to reward your blog readers who leave a comment on your blogs. If your commenters leave their blog URLs on their posts, this plugin would parse the URL for the RSS feed and automatically find and include in the comment the latest blog post of your visitor.

This encourages your visitor to leave more comments because there’s automatic link love given to your commenters. So, in a sense, everyone wins: you will get more comments (which improves your Google standings) and your visitors will get link love and it will definitely increase clickthroughs for them and (if you use the DoFollow Plugin) their pagerank would also improve.

CommentLuv is available for WordPress and WordPress MU, and is compatible for WordPress versions 2.6 and up.

To install CommentLuv, you have to first download it from here, then unzip it. Open up your favorite FTP client and upload CommentLuv to wp-content/plugins. Once the upload is done, you need to go to your plugins page and activate it.

Once it’s activated, you’ll be able to go to the settings page and if you wish, change some settings of the plugin. The plugin will auto-configure for your comment form. If you have a nonstandard comment form or a plugin type comment form, you will need to enter the name or ID values for the author, url and comment fields.

When you’ve finished doing those steps, you visitors would be able to automatically leave the latest posts of their blogs on your blog. CommentLuv also comes in a Drupal version as well, for you non WordPress users.

If you think that Akismet is all just a “stop the spam” tool for our blogs, think again. Akismet has recently release version 2.2.1 that adds a few metrics/measurements to keep you informed of “stop stats” it has as it blocks unwanted comments from your blogs.

There is a new icon to press if your blog is hosted at wordpress.com . Look at the strip of buttons along the “add media” section and you’d see an orange lollipop button that will enable you to quickly add polls into your post. Here’s a brief video about this new feature:

Automattic has recently acquiredPoll Daddy. The world’s market-leading poll and survey service. What once was an independent marvel is now attached to WordPress.com blogs for ease of use. With a few mouse clicks you’re set to discover a new dimension of “audience interactivity”.

If you’ve been a PollDaddy user for quite some time now, you’d probably be thankful as me to note that there will be super improvements in poll performances. First, polls will load and work faster now that it’s hosted on Automattic servers. Second, well from a 2-person development and support team we now potentially have 30 support team members as the Automattic team lends their hands on the PollDaddy team. Third, with a button inclusion in WordPress.com’s toolbars, building a poll will literally take “over a minute”.

If you embed YouTube videos often this news will surely make you smile. Â While it’s all not a big feature, I’d like to tell you that YouTube now supports deep links. Â This means that you can add a special code to the YouTube video URL that makes a click jump to that specific video timeframe versus starting everything from scratch. Â Here’s an example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeZxRYXZ154#t=0m39s

Can you see the “#t=0m39s” ? Â That stands for “start the video on the 39th second time frame”. Â Now if it was a minute and 39 then it would read “#t=1m39s”. Â And so on.

A question was posted if there was any button on the YouTube video that will allow you to tag it with the right time URL. Â For now, there is none. Â You have to manually time it. Â But I’m sure YouTube will be putting that in real soon, as it will make things easier for the user.

Today WordPress.com announcedÂ a new feature called “Tabular Stats“. Â It’s an easy and immediate way to find out how your blog is performing, what visitors want and what you need to make a follow-up blog post on. While there are tons of stat widgets and plugins available, and while Google Analytics alone provide a complete solution to your blog stat needs, I appreciate this plugin because it keeps me inside the WordPress admin interface. Â And it’s simple.

After you download and install the plugin (you’d need your API key, by the way) , you can use it pronto. Â It’s just beside the “dashboard” tab.

Once it’s running it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Will we ever need Google Analytics, after this? Â That is the question!

I think the WordPress team has seen too much of the urchin code splattered across WordPress installs in wordpress.com and the user installed versions. Â Is this WordPress’ way of locking us in? Â Or a way to protect its code forest? Â If you’ve got a popular blog, would it slow it down? Â Your guess is as good as mine.

Just a play of words… the Lijit Wijit is your not-so-usual search wijit… er… widget. Â A search function that basically works like a small community network. Â The basic idea is if someone visits your blog and say searches for the word “vacation”, the usual search widget will only produce results that are found in your blog. Â The Lijit search widget will do more… it will look for “vacation” in your friends blogs or links that you’ve “linking-out to” as part of your trusted sites. Â Very clever, isn’t it.

Because it’s a WordPress widget, it will easily install on versions 2.3-2.6.xx . Â

Another Lijit feature I really like is search stats. Â You now will be able to know what your readers are searching for (!) what a way to prepare for the next blog post. Â This is uber cool.

When your readers search for information in real life, their first step is to typically seek out a friend for the answer. If their friend doesn’t have the answer they need, someone in that friend’s social network may. Eventually, they get an answer they trust, because it came from a source they trust. Your readers can now have that same experience on the web and it all starts with the source they trust. That source is you, the blog publisher.

The Lijit search ‘wijit’ allows your visitors to search through not only your blog content, but also your extended social network. You can combine a number of your social networking accounts(delicious, facebook, mybloglog, etc.). When you install the widget on your blog, all of these accounts are indexed and searchable through the widget.

WordPress has recently released an open source app for managing WordPress-powered blogs via the iPhone. Dubbed WordPress for iPhone, the application can manage both WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WP blogs.

Introducing the first Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users of all experience levels can get going in seconds.

I don’t have an iPhone, so I cannot check it out for myself, though. Has anyone tried this new app? I use a Nokia E51 running Symbian Series 60 version 3. While there are various standalone applications that I can use to manage my WordPress-powered blogs, I usually prefer to just open the admin panel using the built-in browser. Somehow I feel it’s faster that way. I wonder which gives the better user experience in managing blogs–the WP app, or the iPhone’s built in Safari browser.